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UC Berkeley Supplemental Freshman Questionnaire

3. (Optional) Submit one letter of recommendation from a teacher, counselor, coach or anyone familiar with your academic background and extracurricular skills/talents. Your recommender can fill out an online form at the following link. Note that in providing this link to your recommender, you waive your right to view this letter of recommendation at any future point.

it was always my understanding that UC's never accepted/asked for letters of rec.

@basketballbabe13: Are you sure you want one? If they've sent these out, it means they've already separated most of the applicants into "accepted", "???", and "rejected" categories; and you only get the questionnaire if you're in that tiny "???" one.

These come in at least three 'flavors' with different triggers.
One comes to those that mentioned special learning challenges or disabilities,
mostly asking about needs and requirements.
One comes if you had special accomplishments and focuses mostly on that.
The last type is for the small pile on the fence between accept and reject, and may focus more on academic history and the like.

It is good to get a request unless you are certain you are a guaranteed 'yes'.

It's called "augmented review". Your chances of getting in are only IMPROVED by timely responding to the questions and getting great recommendations. If you are asked for your first semester senior grades, provide them and hope you did well. Or if you don't have them yet, let them know and provide it as soon as you receive them. My son received one for his learning disabilities and was accepted for the Fall, 2007. He loves Cal and is doing great, by the way!

Last year Rider nailed it as follows:

"For example, once Berkeley scores the applications, the take the ones that are in the cutoff zone, thus could be either an admit or a reject, and ask for additional information to perform an augmented review. This allows them to make the admit or reject decision for the few percent that are in this gray area.

UCB has three kinds of augmented review questionnaires, AFAIK. One is for someone who had disabilities or challenges, with a focus on guessing how the person might thrive or flounder at Cal. Another is for special talent, where the goal is to compose a well rounded class of 2012 by including a mix of interesting people to complement the high academic achievers. The first two would move people up whose academic performance alone didn't make the cut, while the third type seems to be used for those whose stats are high but right at the decision point.

Berkeley does initial scoring on a scale without much granularity -- eligible applicants are assigned 1, 2, 2.5, 3, 4, or 5. Other campuses such as UCSD use a more fine grained numerical scale and can hit the target number of admissions by selecting a precise value for a cutoff -- moving a number from 7500 to 7501 might be the fine tuning needed to get to the exact target admissions numbers. On the other hand, moving from 2.5 to 3 sweeps in a large number of applicants, so that whatever number UCB sets is going to geenrate either too many or too few for admissions. Augmented review helps sort through the pool to pick just enough to make their target.

UCLA and UCSD are said to also do augmented review, although the reasons and mechanics would vary in their case. For UCSD, since they have a very rigid and documented rubric for scoring, the augmented review might be sent out for students who are just short of the cutoff points but have ambiguous comments in the application that in some cases might qualify for points. By reading the response inthe augmented review, the points are either assigned or not, resulting in an admit or reject decision. UCSD sets its cutoff to buffer for a few such augmented cases and to buffer for a small number of appeals from rejected students who provide more information to prove they warrant points in some category."

They are taking a close look at your application because they are seriously considering admitting you. The letter of recommendation should be from a person who really believes you can be successful at Cal and will do a good job expressing that. Congratulations on being near the top of tens of thousands of applicants!

Yes I'm pretty sure I want one. Since my UC apps were the first of many I have completed I don't believe they were to the same caliber as my ivy apps. If I were given a qurationairre I am confident that it would increase my chances because on top of my great stats I have excellent recs and I'm good at xonveying my personality through shirt answers. Sorrycabout any typos i'm typing this on my itouch.

I got this supplement as well. It says if you haven't gotten ur grades yet just send in the questionare first and then u can send ur grades later..but i'm wondering do u HAVE to? because i have a C in math right now so i dont want to send that in.

I am including my grades, although there is a possibility of me receiving two B's. I am curious as to the format, can different questions be answered in resume/essay format? I have the "talent" questionnaire.

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